Orange County, NC: Educational outcomes

We recently worked with the Chamber for a Greater Chapel Hill-Carrboro, the governments of the Towns of Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Hillsborough, and Orange County to streamline existing processes for acquiring, updating, and maintaining the data they use for their community reports and presentations.

As part of that work, we’ve released a series of reports looking at demographic and economic trends in Orange County, NC. Here are some highlights from Carolina Demography’s report on community heath and well-being in Orange County. (Published September 17, 2020). You can read the full report here.

End-of-Grade (EOG) Test Performance

Strengths

• Large improvements in Black 3rd grade students’ EOG Reading performance at Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools (CHCCS): From 2014 to 2019, the share of Black 3rd graders that earned a Grade-Level Proficient EOG score at CHCCS grew by more than 23 percentage points: 34% vs. 57.4%. This closed the White-Black achievement gap by 27.2 percentage points.
  • There remains an achievement gap between White and Black students of 30.3 percentage points at CHCCS.
• Over half of students in 3rd and 8th grade earned a College and Career Ready (CCR) score on both the Mathematics and Reading End-of-Grade (EOG) exams at CHCCS in 2019: The highest share was earned by 3rd grade students on the reading exam, where 67% of students earned a score of 4 or 5.
• At least half of Black, Hispanic, and Multi-Racial students at CHCCS and Orange County Schools earned a College and Career Ready score on 8th grade EOG Science exams in 2019.
  • At Orange County: This ranged from 56.6% of Black students to 71.4% of multi-racial students.
  • At CHCCS: This ranged from 50% of Black students to 84.9% of multi-racial students.

Weaknesses

• The share of 3rd graders earning a Grade-Level Proficient score in Reading (3 or higher) declined for Asian, Hispanic, and White students at CHCCS from 2014 to 2019: Declines range from -1.5 percentage points for Hispanic students to -3.8 percentage points for White students.
• Similarly, 3rd grade EOG Reading performance declined for Black, Hispanic, and White students at Orange County Schools from 2014 to 2019: The percentage point decline ranged from -3 percentage points for White students to -12 percentage points for Hispanic students.

College and Career Readiness

Strengths

• CHCCS students’ earn the highest standardized test scores on ACT and SAT exams – for the entire exam and across subjects – compared to the state and peers.

Weaknesses

• In 2019, CHCCS had the lowest high school graduation rates for Black students among peer school districts: 78.6% of Black students graduated from CHCCS in the 2018-19 school year. Among peers, Chatham County Schools had the highest Black graduation rate at 90.7% of students.
• CHCCS had the second-largest gap among peers in ACT WorkKeys (career readiness exam) performance between Black students and White students: 93% of White students earned a career-ready score on the ACT WorkKeys exam compared to 63% of Black students, representing a gap of 30 percentage points. The LEA with the largest Black-White gap was Durham Public Schools at 40.1 percentage points.

If you are interested in reports like these for your county, please email us at demography@unc.edu to discuss further!

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Categories: Education, NC in Focus